I have a habit of taking pictures of public electronic displays that have failed or that show error messages. The point is that the people looking at the displays cannot act on these messages. There is no use case for showing a message to someone that might only be irritated by an error. These displays should be set up so that they silently notify administrators about failures and should have a fallback state to display something useful to the people walking past the displays.
Here are some recent examples:
Continuous integration server display notification of pending restart of OS after updating
Network connection failure in a web browser in a museum
Cafeteria menu display at HTWG Konstanz
Self-service bag drop at OSL airport
Duty free store advertising display
The media player on the advertising display in a bank just crashed. Do you want to send a bug report to the developers team?
Advertisement for expensive watches
Display in a bathroom expects user interaction because of OS restart (the restart happened again and again because of a persisting failure)
